Obituary: Gaming pioneer Steve Bristow helped design Tank, Breakout

Atari engineer was instrumental to the company's golden age.

Steve Bristow, one of the engineers heavily involved in the development of Atari's arcade and home console golden age, passed away Sunday, according to a Facebook post from Atari Inc. author Marty Goldberg. He was 65.

Bristow was a part of the game industry from the beginning. While still a student at the University of California-Berkley and an intern at Ampex, he and his wife designed the two-player mode for Computer Space, the first coin-operated game, alongside the likes of Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn, and Ted Dabney. Shortly after Bushnell left Computer Space maker Nutting Associates to start Atari, Bristow followed, developing early multi-paddle versions of Pong (Pong Doubles and Quadrapong) as well as Indy 800, one of the first arcade racing games.

Bristow was also tasked with some of the grunt work in those early days of arcade gaming. "I worked part-time doing maintenance on the Pong machines and collecting the money," he recalled in a Wired interview. "In Berkeley, a weapons permit is hard to get, but they won't stop you from carrying a hatchet, so people out at 2am would see my wife walking ahead of me carrying a hatchet and me carrying $1,500 in quarters, and they'd say, 'Leave them alone.'"

In the mid-'70s, with Pong sales faltering, Bristow helped revive Atari with Tank, conceived as an easier-to-control version of the highly technical Computer Space and one of the first games to store graphics on a ROM chip. He later helped with the conception and design of Breakout alongside Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak.

Bristow was still with the company when it moved from arcade development to work on Atari Video Computer System. “The original rule on the chip design was ‘Can it play Tank, Pong, and a driving game?’” Bristow recalled in an extensive interview with Retro Gamer. “We had three big hits, and that was how we were going to sell this new console!”

Further Reading

As the VCS faded following the game industry crash of 1983, though, Bristow made an executive decision that altered the company's history forever. "In the early '80s, Atari debated whether to go with the internally developed successor to the 2600 or a new console that Nintendo wanted us to market," he told Wired. "Regrettably, it was my decision not to license the Nintendo system." Yes, if not for Bristow, Americans might have played Super Mario Bros. on the Atari Entertainment System decades ago.

It's sad that this is the first time I can recall hearing the name of a man who had such a huge influence on my formative years.

1751 posts | registered Nov 9, 2000

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl